Keep Your Peace, You’re Going To Outlive Him Anyway.
That’s my grandmother in the photo. She was 102 years old when that photo was taken. The one thing I remember most about my grandmother was she was full of great advice. Advice that she had learned, not from the internet, not from an Instagram reel, not even from an advice column in the newspaper. No my grandmother doled out advice she had learned from years and years of experience. Turns out she was pretty spot on!
Nanny (that’s what we called her) would be the first one to tell you she had an amazing life! So often I heard her say that, “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.” That’s the first piece of advice from Nanny that I want to share with you, gratitude, because if you looked at Nanny’s life on paper, the bits and pieces of her actual life, it wouldn’t look like she had been very lucky. But lucky she believed she was! Thankful she always was! And she was always positive in the face of some of life’s most difficult challenges! Which probably is the reason she lived to be 102 years, 7 months and 1 day when she finally passed in 2012. When she passed she was the oldest resident of Houlton Maine and the last surviving class member of Houlton Hight School Class of 1928.
Nanny was born in 1910 in far northern Maine. She was the oldest of what would be a family of 8 children, but not all of them lived to adulthood. Her parents never owned their own home. Never owned a car, she being the very first in her family to learn how to drive! She remembered when electricity was installed in their house, one single light bulb that hung from a cord dangling from the middle of the living room ceiling. She remembered taking baths in the big galvanized tub her mother filled with hot water in the kitchen. She remembered her mother feeding the “hobos” (homeless) from the back door, giving them a little of whatever she had but always a slice from the bar of soap. She remembered her father’s handlebar mustache that he waxed and twisted the ends tight and turned them upwards. She came from a far different world then we live in now. But yet her gratitude and her determination to stay positive are timeless.
Nanny’s first disappointment in life, or at least the one I’m most aware of, happened when she was just 12 years old. She was already the older sister to two little brothers and a little sister when her mother gave birth, at home, to a baby girl that died shortly after birth. As Nanny told me about it, “I watched my father lay that little white coffin in the hole he had dug under the pine tree on the front lawn of our house.” In 1922 twelve year old girls were a lot more responsible and mature and adult like then we would expect a girl of the same age to be today. I’m sure Nanny was already helping with the care of her younger siblings, household chores and more acutely aware of what was happening emotionally in the household. I’m sure the house was filled with her many aunts, her mother having a plethora of sisters, but it still must have been a traumatic experience for a 12 year old.
The following year, really only 11 months later, Nanny, still only 12 years old watched her mother give birth to another baby girl at home. This one too only lived a few hours and then Nanny watched her father bury another white coffin under the pine tree on the front lawn. You have to imagine that the death of two babies within a year would have somehow touched Nanny’s young life, left it’s mark in someway. But as she always said, “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.”
In 1930, at the age of 20 Nanny married a very dashingly handsome young man. This man, my grandfather, was from a family of all boys, five of them! And as Nanny used to tell me when she would look at my four teenage sons “Your boys get their looks from your grandfather and his brothers. They were all very handsome men!” My grandfather was handsome, I’ve seen the photos from the 1930’s! He was always dressed to the nines, he sported a fancy dress coat, hat and the finest shoes wherever he went. Even though he died when I was only 10 years old, I always remember my grandfather being impeccably dressed. His shoes shined and his hair slicked back. Along with his very debonair appearance came his charismatic personality! My grandfather could talk to anyone! People were drawn to him! He just radiated an energy that made people want to listen to him! He was a traveling furniture salesman during the Depression. Imagine going door to door with doll house size samples of furniture and convincing people to buy furniture when the economy was at it’s worst! But he did and he was very good at it, eventually providing for his family in a very upper middle class way, where he bought a house in one of the best neighborhoods.
Sadly though my grandfather had his demons. He drank alcohol, a lot. Nanny used to tell us stories of how he got very drunk one day and painted himself into the corner of the porch and had to sleep out there all night. Or the time he took apart their car, with all of the parts, nuts and bolts strewn all over the lawn, to drunk to put it all back together until the next morning. Which he somehow did! The other side to my grandfather I only heard about in innuendo, or vague comments from the adults in my young life. Let’s just say I don’t believe my grandfather was always faithful to my grandmother. I also don’t think he was a kind or gentle man. Oh he was to me! I have nothing but loving memories of my grandfather, but I suspect he ruled that house with an iron fist, just a hunch. When I was in my 30’s, and struggling as I went through a divorce, I asked Nanny why she had never divorced my grandfather. She said it was because in her day women didn’t have the same opportunities that women had now. But then she said “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.”
Nanny raised three children of her own. I’d like to think as children they were good kids, at least I hope they were! Because as adults they were far from angelic. From their own struggles with alcohol and drugs, to multiple failed marriages, to criminal rap sheets that were printed in the newspapers back then for the whole world to see, and then ultimately losing a son to suicide. It couldn’t have been easy. She faced the loss of some of her own biological grandchildren, through divorce, that she never saw again. And had to accept the addition of step grandchildren that floated in and then out again once those marriages failed. But through it all she would say “I’ve been very lucky, I’ve had a good life.”
For 102 years she kept telling herself that despite everything that was happening around her. Nanny never once gave in to what some would consider a crushing round of blows! I never saw my grandmother sad. Even when she should have been, she would always find the positive side of the situation and made sure to mention it to me. When my grandfather passed away after they had been married for 45 years, she moved on to the next phase of her life. She spent winters in Florida with her girlfriends. Was always there for her great grandchildren, and then the great great grandchildren. She attended sporting events and knitted mittens. But most memorable of all to everyone, was the treat that it was to sit at her kitchen table and have her serve you graham crackers and a glass of milk. Everyone still talks about that.
As a young wife, when I would have spats with my. husband, she’d tell me “Keep your peace, you’re going to out live him anyway.” I always laughed at that. Statistically she was correct I suppose! But “Keep your peace.” that was always her greatest advice, “Keep your peace.” What she was really saying was at all costs keep yourself calm. Manage your stress. No matter what is going on around you, keep your inner self calm and you’ll get through just about anything. It most certainly must have worked for her, because we know now that stress can be a contributing factor in an early death. When you think about what she dealt with for the majority of her life, and yet she lived to be 102, perfectly healthy, never even needing so much as an aspirin, she clearly had mastered the art of keeping her peace! But you know, she was very lucky, she had lived a good life!
As I was preparing to write this blog this week I asked my sister if she had any photos of Nanny that I could use, as everything of mine is currently sitting in a storage unit! She sent me the photo I used at the start of this blog but she also sent me this one. Nanny is in the black and white dress, that’s her friend Natalie beside her (and probably Natalie’s husband Don taking the photo) and that’s my grandfather. These were the days before just graham crackers and milk were served. This was when Nanny served coffee and cookies on the fine china! That’s her Friendly Village dishware set! This is when half and half for your coffee was poured into a creamer and not just the carton thrown on the table, even if it was just your best friends and your husband sitting around with you. But what struck me most about this picture was that I can generally tell the year it was taken. Which means that myself and my sister are now older then our grandparents were when this picture was taken. I made sure to point that out to my sister. She texted me back “No way!!!” Yes way! We are now older then Nanny and Grampy were sitting around this table!
We can all be this lucky and live a good life. I say it all the time, “We create our own realities”…..pretty sure I learned that from my grandmother!